"But do you sometimes travel just for pleasure?", someone has asked me recently. I suppose I do, but a travel in which I learn nothing, and buy no books, isn't much of a pleasure for me. My ideal schedule is to travel six times a year, and sometimes I manage even more. It's too much to be efficient as a strategy; as a program, it is excessive. At the end of a four-week research travel, I often bring 20 kg and more in books and other materials. Evidently, what I can effectively study in the breaks between one trip and another is only a small fraction of this volume. My intellectual life is thus largely an accumulation of undigested travels; it also explains why the "world literature" section of this website is so slow to appear. Yet I suppose one day these experiences, gleaned across the world and slowly digested, will form a critical mass causing some essential breakthrough.Be as it may, I constantly travel in search of rare books published far away from my own academic and cultural space, to contradict what David Damrosch once said: that in the matter of world literature, we must relay, after all, on the bookshop around the corner. I don't. I do travel in search of my books. This philosophy comes close to the concept of "itinerant scholar" proposed by the Malay intellectual Farish Noor. But there are also other references, other paradigms, such as the one I found in Bashō and his journey to the deep north:

Determined to fall​A weather-exposed skeletonI cannot help the sore windBlowing through my heart​

​The same travel that makes me overcrowd my tiny apartment with all kinds of improbable publications is crucially a way of bringing about emptiness.